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Monday, November 23, 2015

Thoughts from PGConf.eu, PostgreSQL Europe Conference 2015, Day 2

This is a continuation of notes from PGConf.eu in Vienna this year. First day notes available here and third day notes available here.

I've started the second day with WAL, Standbys and Postgrs 9.5 by Michael Paquier, which was a morning talk about archiving and warm standby and how the postgresql 9.5 may help here.

Then there was my talk called Database containers in enterprise world. I mentioned there our experiences with containers preparation and how RH takes containers (not as VMs, but rather applications); that all was described rather in lower level of detail, but rather with bigger context. Not many people were presented (Robert Haas in the next room talking about Parallelism in postgresql was just too big concurence, just bad luck in timing), but those who were there, were already familiar with containers a bit, which turned into very nice discussion and many questions in the end. The questiones were mostly about differences between Nulecule and kubernetes templates, docker compose; further questions about Nulecule, that I also roughly presented.

VACUUM, Freezing & Avoiding Wraparound was a talk by Simon Riggs where he talked about high concurency, row visibility, deleting rows that make bloat. He explained the principle of vacuum, how long running queries influence it, how it works actually and why it is that important.

Duo Gabriele Bartolini and Marco Nenciarini talked about logging of huge PostgreSQL data and analysing them, which deserves proper tooling in the first place. Guys from 2nd quadrant were talking about experiences with elastic search + logstash + kibana (ELK stack) in a talk Integrating PostgreSQL with Logstash for real-time monitoring.

Linux tuning to improve PostgreSQL performance by Ilya Kosmodemiansky was a great overview around what everything in kernel we need to take into account when tuning postgresql performance. Most of it was about setting proper sizes of memory pages and buffers.

Tomas Vondra talked once again on PGConf.eu, this time about PostgreSQL Performance on EXT4, XFS, F2FS, BTRFS and ZFS after he did serveral benchmarks of different filesystems. Shortly, ZFS was quite poor in default settings, but it can be improved by fixing pages size. Otherwise, the results are quite comparable (XFS, EXT4 seemed the best though). BTRFS seemed quite bad in read-write bechmark, while XFS nad EXT4 were best again there.
http://www.slideshare.net/fuzzycz/postgresql-on-ext4-xfs-btrfs-and-zfs-54525451

Second day was closed by 90 minutes of lightning talks, that have already become tradition on PostgreSQL conference and strict 5 minute rule makes it really interesting.